Plasma display devices have been drawing attention recently among various types of flat panel image display units, especially for the reasons that they have capability of displaying at higher speed, wider viewing angle, higher quality of display images, and the like features because they are self-emissive as opposed to liquid crystal panels. Plasma display devices are therefore used as display devices in places where many people gather and in homes for enjoying images in large screens.
Plasma display devices are also used for a variety of applications as large-scale displays. For this reason, the plasma display devices are required to have signal input terminals of such a structure that accepts connections of external apparatuses such as personal computers, television tuners, video players, and the like that output video signals including various forms of data signals.
Therefore, the plasma display devices are provided with a variety of signal input terminals that can connect with many external signal sources. However, ordinary users seldom use all of the signal input terminals, but most of them use the plasma display devices by connecting only certain kinds of external apparatuses. Some of the variety of signal input terminals thus become useless although they are provided for adapting to numerous kinds of apparatuses.
These problems can be dealt with if plasma display devices are manufactured in a plurality of different kinds so that they have different signal input terminals according to the requirements of users. However, this requires manufacturing of many varieties of plasma display devices in order to supply them to the users desiring the variety of different usages described above, and it reduces the manufacturing efficiency.
There is an idea that has been proposed to solve the above problems, that plasma display devices have signal input terminals of such a structure that allows replacement of a part of the signal input terminals.
However, there still is a problem in these plasma display devices that they are not flexibly adaptable to a plurality of different kinds of video signals.